I have used AltInventory a bit but it just seems a bit, what's a good word, cumbersome? Bulky?

This may be quit a bit simpler and perhaps easy for someone but i'm not sure. Here is my wish, the ability to type a command followed by a keyword and it simply lists all of the occurrences of it among all of my inventories, vaults, and shared vault (maybe wardrobe as well?). Here is an example of what I was thinking;

The biggest problem with what you are looking for is that the Turbine API only allows querying the Vault and Shared Storage when you are interacting with them. This is one of the reasons why AltInventory keeps track of so much information. For a search plugin to work it would have to have all of the inventory data that AltInventory keeps.

That said, the next version of AltInventory will have a simplified search window (as well as an option to turn off each type of panel for those you don't use to help with the "clutter"). The simplified search will allow you to quickly and easily search for all items matching a search phrase in all storage on all characters and is sortable and filterable by category the same as the inventory panel. It does not yet have a chat command interface but that is fairly easy to implement.

The drawback to waiting for the next version of AltInventory? Time. My development box is still dead and I have no idea when I will be able to replace or repair it.

I really do appreciate all of the work on AltInventory. It has been a great tool for me. A CLI interface isn't that important but a single search field to search all characters and all storage would be wonderful. AltInventory does a wonderful job at collecting the data but having to select all characters (my current character is the default selection) then which storage medium (vault/bags/shared storage) to search then having to copy my search term between each is where I get hung up. Even the item icons and button icons I could live with out. I'm not much of a coder other than some tweaking but I can assist by testing and giving feedback on any changes.